Previews

God of War: Chains of Olympus

We've dug into the first two levels of Kratos' handheld adventure, and it's looking divine!

Spiffy:

Plays and feels like God of War II on PSP; stellar visuals.

Iffy:

Some control mapping takes getting used to; occasional screen tearing.

God of War: Chains of Olympus can be summed up simply as "God of War on PSP." It's a statement that's both pat and loaded. The idea that it's simply a continuation of another Sony franchise on PSP is indeed true, but it's also one of best franchises to launch in the past five years. The developers of this PSP edition certainly had a lot to aspire to, but judging by the two hours we've invested so far, we think that the team at OC-based developer Ready at Dawn is up to the task.

We've captured oodles of video to give you a feel for what the combat and settings look like. The first two hours should bring you through Attica, the stage that Ready at Dawn has been showing off for nine months, and Marathon, a section that will start to reveal exactly where CoO's story will take you. Up to this point, the only plot detail we've known about the game is that it takes place a decade before God of War.

The basic outline is that Morpheus, the god of dreams, has cast a dark pall over Marathon, and it's up to Kratos to find Helios, the sun god, to burn through the haze and restore order to Greece. Perhaps that's only the tip of the iceberg, but we wonder how many deities are going to eat the Blades of Chaos in the time leading up to Kratos' amateur tracheotomy on Ares.

Lucky PSP owners who got their hands on the limited edition demo a few months ago should be familiar with Attica, the first stage of the game, in which the age-old war between Spartans and Persians bleeds over into Big K's territory. It seems that the Persians have brought Greece an unwanted gift in the form of a fire-breathing basilisk. Kratos mows through waves of Persian soldiers before encountering his first mini-boss, a warlord bearing the Efreet, a demon that unleashes a fiery wave of destruction. After defeating the warlord (and witnessing a finisher that rivals the first game's Kraken impalement for wince-inducing violence), you'll receive this powerful magic spell.

No God of War game can kick off without some, ahem, virility exercises; in the tradition of the other two, the recently-widowed Kratos engages two nubile maidens at once for red orbs. (Oddly, the PSP's controls seem to create a double entendre of their own... you'll see.) From there, you'll continue tracking down the brutish beast that threatens to scorch Attica to the ground. Whether it's wounding the monster with a ballista or using the Blades of Chaos to dump the side of a tower onto its head, Chains of Olympus' battles are as worthy of praise as the Kraken or Colossus of Rhodes encounters in the PS2 games.